The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for manufacturing wallpaper by printing a design on a wallpaper sheet, and a program for causing a computer to function as a wallpaper manufacturing apparatus. It is to be noted that the wallpaper herein means not only a material attached on a wall surface of an architectural structure but also a sheet having a printed design which is attached on a floor, a ceiling, a door, a surface of a furniture or the like.
In recent years, various designs are used for interior materials of architectural structures, furniture and furnishing goods.
For example, also in case of wallpaper for an interior decoration used on a ceiling or a wall surface of an architectural structure, there are sold those having various designs or color paints applied on the surfaces thereof. As means for applying such a paint, a gravure painting system is used. Since such a gravure painting system, however, requires a photochemical graving technique, this system is not consequently suitable for manufacturing wallpaper meeting the small-lot and multi-product demand and solely satisfies the large-lot and small-product needs.
Recent demands of users are diversified, and production of wallpaper which meets the preference of each user is desired. However, such wallpaper which meets the preference of each user can not be expected to be sold to other users.
On the other hand, there has been recently is developed an ink-jet printer capable of color printing on paper having a large size such as A0 size or B0 size. Therefore, in order to meet the above-described small-lot and large-product needs, use of this ink-jet printer is considered. Further, a wallpaper sheet on which designs can be printed by such an ink-jet printer has been also developed, and, for example, Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 10-309764 discloses such a wallpaper sheet.
However, even if a wallpaper sheet such as disclosed in the above Publication and the ink-jet printer are used to try to produce wallpaper with a design desired by a user, how to fetch the design desired by a user is yet to be sufficiently examined, and the above Publication does not disclose such a method.
Moreover, in the prior art, wallpaper is partially wasted when attaching the wallpaper onto a wall surface in order to match designs. That is, a part of the wallpaper is cut and wasted for a part of a wall surface such as a door or a window on which no wallpaper is attached in order to avoid the discontinuous design.
This problem can be solved by using an ink-jet printer capable of color-printing on paper having a large size to print a desired design. In case of printing by using such a printer, however, the following problems occur.
1. When one design runs off the width range of paper; sheets of wallpaper must be printed one by one with a pattern designed based on a calculation for assuring the design continuity between adjacent sheets of wallpaper, which leads to the deteriorated efficiency.
2. Similarly, at a part where a sheet of wallpaper is adjacent to another sheet of wallpaper, attachment is carried out with an overlap portion, but sheets of wallpaper must be printed one by one by calculating the design with which the overlap is previously assured, which leads to the deteriorated efficiency.
3. The post-treatment may be difficult in some cases depending on a size or a shape of printed wallpaper.
4. It is necessary to specify which part in the entire wallpaper corresponds to the printed wallpaper at a work site.